This is another guest post from Anthony Peters @apeters522, Anthony is a very innovative English High School teacher from Parklands College in CapeTown who delights in using technology in his High School English classes very creatively. We are always very happy when Anthony submits a post to us. You can view all his previous posts on our blog via the ‘Anthony Peters’ label https://goo.gl/3We6is under Quick links on the right side.
“The youngest additions to the Secondary Faculty have arrived at Parklands College! The orientation boasted a wide variety of exciting activities specifically designed to integrate the new learners into our thriving environment…and they hit the ground running, literally! Please see the following descriptions and photos from just some of last week:
Treasure Hunt
The treasure hunt required the learners to scan QR Codes that gave them a clue (in rhyme) to a location somewhere in the school. The learners were required to find these locations and take a ‘quality’ selfie at each stop. The learners then had to submit these images to a Google Folder and share it with Mr Peters. This fast-paced and adrenaline-fuelled task achieved numerous benefits: it helped the learners to familiarise themselves with the school’s numerous buildings, it taught them how to use the numerous facets of Google Drive, it encouraged a great deal of communication, collaboration and leadership within the groups, and let’s not forget, it was a great deal of fun!
Keynote Training (‘Who am I?’)
As the learners were new to the school, it was important that we all got to know each other better! After doing some basic revision of the highly versatile app Keynote, the learners were tasked with creating their own five-slide presentation including ‘the mandatory selfie’ of themselves, their family, hobbies, pets, as well as an amusing video of one of the aforementioned. These were then submitted to the Google Classroom. The professional quality of their presentations was crucial and this also surreptitiously encouraged them to refine their use of various apps that will be used within lessons later this year.
Tell a Tale Story and Book Creator Training
The art of quality storytelling is an important skill within English and this training session encouraged our budding authors to think on their feet with a ‘Speed Story’ task! In groups, learners had only twenty minutes to come up with a short story using the Tell a Tale app! This application gave them only the introductory sentence, three objects and the concluding sentence as inspiration so this really tested their imagination!
A representative of each group then read out their group’s story in order to stand a chance of winning a chocolate!
After this high-speed challenge, the learners were required to convert the plethora of exciting stories into a digital book inclusive of images, voice clips and videos using the Book Creator app.
Some members of the ever-imaginative group even went above and beyond and created their story characters using Snapchat!
We greatly look forward to seeing what this innovative group of young minds are capable of this year so follow the College’s Twitter handle (@ParklandsTweet) and mine (@apeters522) for live updates!”
Submitted by Mr P
